HHS PROPOSES ONE-YEAR DELAY OF ICD-10 COMPLIANCE DATE Monday, Apr 9 2012

For Immediate Release:	Monday, April 09, 2012
Contact:	CMS Office of Public Affairs 202-690-6145

HHS PROPOSES ONE-YEAR DELAY OF ICD-10 COMPLIANCE DATE

(CMS-0040-P)

Action

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced a proposed rule that would delay, from October 1, 2013 to October 1, 2014, the compliance date for the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition diagnosis and   procedure codes (ICD-10).

The ICD-10 compliance date change is part of a proposed rule that would adopt a standard for a unique health plan identifier (HPID), adopt a data element that would serve as an “other entity” identifier (OEID), and add a National Provider Identifier (NPI) requirement.   The proposed rule was developed by the Office of E-Health Standards and Services (OESS) as part of its ongoing role, delegated by HHS, to establish adopt standards for electronic health care transactions under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).   OESS is part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Background

On January 16, 2009, HHS published a final rule to adopt ICD-10 as the HIPAA standard code sets to replace the previously adopted ICD–9–codes for diagnosis and procedure codes (see HIPAA Administrative Simplification;  Modifications to Medical Data Code Set Standards to Adopt ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS,  74 FR 3328). The compliance date set by the final rule was October 1, 2013.

Implementation of ICD-10 will accommodate new procedures and diagnoses unaccounted for in the ICD-9 code set and allow for greater specificity of diagnosis-related groups and preventive services.  This transition will lead to improved accuracy in reimbursement for medical services, fraud detection, and historical claims and diagnoses analysis for the health care system.  Many researchers have published articles on the far-reaching positive effects of ICD-10 on quality issues, including use of specific reasons for patient non-compliance and detailed procedure information by degree of difficulty, among other benefits.

Some provider groups have expressed serious concerns about their ability to meet the October 1, 2013 compliance date.   Their concerns about the ICD-10 compliance date are based, in part, on implementation issues they have experienced meeting HHS’ compliance deadline for the Associated Standard Committee’s (ASC) X12 Version 5010 standards (Version 5010) for electronic health care transactions.  Compliance with Version 5010 is necessary prior to implementation of ICD-10.

All covered entities must transition to ICD-10 at the same time to ensure a smooth transition to the updated medical data code sets.   Failure of any one industry segment to achieve compliance with ICD-10 would negatively impact all other industry segments and result in rejected claims and provider payment delays.   HHS believes the change in the compliance date for ICD-10, as proposed in this rule, would give providers and other covered entities more time to prepare and fully test their systems to ensure a smooth and coordinated transition among all industry segments.

Provisions of the proposed rule announced today

HHS is proposing to change the ICD-10 compliance date to October 1, 2014.

As stated, the ICD-10 compliance date change is part of a proposed rule that would adopt a standard for a unique health plan identifier (HPID), adopt a data element that would serve as an “other entity” identifier (OEID), and add a National Provider Identifier (NPI) requirement.

Standards compliance date

HHS proposes that covered entities must be in compliance with ICD-10 on October 1, 2014.

The proposed rule, CMS-0040-P, may be viewed at www.ofr.gov/inspection.aspx.

A news release on the proposed rule may be viewed at http://www.hhs.gov/news.

#  #  #  #  #

Leave a Response »

 

Congress approves measure averting 27 percent physician cut through 2012 Friday, Feb 17 2012

Special Edition: SGR Update

Congress approves measure averting 27 percent physician cut through 2012

A House-Senate Conference Committee tasked with identifying a compromise to avoid the pending 27.4 percent Medicare physician payment cut reached a 10-month deal that would maintain current physician payment rates through the end of the year. The measure was approved this afternoon by both the House and Senate. The measure now goes to President Obama for his signature. The President is expected to sign the bill.

Leave a Response »

 

HHS announces intent to delay ICD-10 compliance date Friday, Feb 17 2012

News Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 16, 2012

Contact: CMS Public Affairs
(202) 690-6145

HHS announces intent to delay ICD-10 compliance date
As part of President Obama’s commitment to reducing regulatory burden, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen G. Sebelius today announced that HHS will initiate a process to postpone the date by which certain health care entities have to comply with International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition diagnosis and procedure codes (ICD-10).

The final rule adopting ICD-10 as a standard was published in January 2009 and set a compliance date of October 1, 2013 – a delay of two years from the compliance date initially specified in the 2008 proposed rule. HHS will announce a new compliance date moving forward.

“ICD-10 codes are important to many positive improvements in our health care system,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We have heard from many in the provider community who have concerns about the administrative burdens they face in the years ahead. We are committing to work with the provider community to reexamine the pace at which HHS and the nation implement these important improvements to our health care system.”

ICD-10 codes provide more robust and specific data that will help improve patient care and enable the exchange of our health care data with that of the rest of the world that has long been using ICD-10. Entities covered under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) will be required to use the ICD-10 diagnostic and procedure codes.

###

Leave a Response »

 

I’d rather buy a month’s worth of Starbucks than…pay my doctor bill Wednesday, Jul 6 2011

One of the biggest frustrations we have in the health care industry is due to patients not understanding their own health insurance benefits. Oftentimes, patients think that just because they carry insurance, that means that everything is covered and they don’t have to pay anything. Patients receive health care service and a month later they discover that their insurance doesn’t cover that particular service; however, instead of accepting the responsibility of paying, many patients fight, demand, and threaten the physician’s office staff to make the balance go away.

This phenomenon has gotten worse in the past twenty years or so. I subscribe to the theory that much of this mentality is due to the inception of HMO’s. In the beginning, HMO’s had either zero patient financial responsibility, or an exceptionally low out-of-pocket cost. People have been conditioned in thinking that health care is an entitlement. After about a decade, due to insurance companies (and employer groups) not being able to withstand the expense of higher utilization of “free” health care, they began to make the consumer more responsible by charging higher co-pays and not covering certain services. Unfortunately, most Americans expect the same Cadillac coverage without any additional expense (beyond their insurance premium and co-pay).

A major challenge in physician practices is to help their patient’s understand their insurance company’s reimbursement policies, all the while maintaining good will. Physicians are finding themselves having to develop various financial informed consent forms to assure that the patient understands that they may be responsible for some of the cost. Medicare has required this, in the form of Advanced Beneficiary Notices (ABN), for years.  Even so, we often hear patients state, “I signed it but didn’t read it.”  Or, “I was afraid if I didn’t sign it that I wouldn’t get the service.” Perhaps the days of accountability are long gone.

One of the biggest threats we hear from patients is that they will leave our practice if we don’t write off their balance. Not much that you can do about that. Health care is a business and we cannot pay the bills with altruism. In addition, it is fraud to bill the insurance company for services and write off the patient’s responsibility. Aside from financial hardship cases, routine adjustments of patient responsibility can get a physician excluded and/or fined by the government when it is a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid. Worst case scenario for commercial insurance is the insurance company dropping the physician from their network.

With lower reimbursements, practices really need to devote more energy in collecting all revenues due. The average overhead for a primary care physician practice is reaching 60%. There are no government subsidies for physicians, other than rural health care, community health care centers and native american health centers. More and more physicians are closing their offices, retiring early, selling their practices to hospitals, transitioning to concierge medicine, or going to cash only practices. This is devastating to primary care because of the physician shortage; however, many specialists are also getting hit hard as well.

6 Responses »

 

Burn Coding/Rule of Nines Monday, Apr 18 2011

There are several CPT codes related to burn coding that I want to share with you to enhance your coding and reimbursement. These codes refer to local treatment of burned surface area only. When using these burns codes, remember to document percentage of body surface involved and depth of burn. Remember your “Rule of Nines” in calculating Total Body Surface Area!

• 16000 Initial Treatment, first degree burn, when no more than local treatment is required.
• 16020 Dressings AND/OR Debridement of partial thickness burns, Initial OR Subsequent; small (less than 5% total body surface area)
• 16025 Dressings AND/OR Debridement of partial thickness burns, Initial OR Subsequent; medium (e.g. whole face or whole extremity, or 5% to 10% of total body surface area)
• 16030 Dressings AND/OR Debridement of partial thickness burns, Initial OR Subsequent; large (e.g. more than one extremity, or greater than 10% of total body surface area)

These codes can be used in addition to an office visit; however, the office visit must be medically necessary and a modifier -25 must be appended to the office visit. An example of a medically necessary office visit would be to prescribe medications (such as antibiotics and/or pain medication, for example).

Rule of Nines Burn Chart for Adults

Rule of Nines Burn Chart for Infant

Leave a Response »

 

Well Child Visit vs. School/Sports/Camp Form completion Tuesday, Feb 22 2011

Most insurance companies will cover a well-child physical; however, the vast majority will NOT cover a “sport”, “school”, “camp” (etc.) physical.  There are several ways that this can be handled:

1)  If it is time for a well-child physical, perform the normal well-child physical and complete any paperwork during that visit.  The well-child visit should be coded using CPT 9938x-8839x series along with V20.2 diagnosis code.  If the child is eligible for this benefit, the claim should be paid.  Most health plans have a limit of one well-child visit per year.

2)  If the child recently had a well-child check and, if it is possible to complete the form using the information from the recent well-child check, go ahead and complete the form using that information.  This can be done free of charge.

3)  The last option is to have the child come to the office for a visit to complete the form and charge a CPT 9920x-9921x series code with a diagnosis code of V70.3.  The insurance company will NOT pay for this and the visit should be considered “Time of Service”.  The parent should be informed of this fact prior to the visit.

 

3 Responses »

 

AZZ Cardfile Saturday, Jan 1 2011

Happy New Year!   Many of us make new year’s resolutions and one such resolution that is often made is to get more organized.  I wanted to recommend a helpful computer program that can assist you in creating a database of useful information and to provide easy access to information that you regularly use, both professionally and personally.

Let  me introduce you to AZZ Cardfile:

http://www.azzcardfile.com/

You can download a trial of this program for free and see how other people have used it by looking at collections that have been submitted:

http://www.azzcardfile.com/collections/

There are so many ways that this program can be used and one is only limited by their imagination.  The collections provide some ideas and may be useful to others.  Many people use this program for recipes (ethnic dishes, beverages, desserts, etc.) or a way to create a database of gift ideas.  One thing that I use this program for is to organize my professional letter and form templates for easy reference.

Leave a Response »

 

If it’s not documented… Thursday, Dec 2 2010

I want to share with you my call recording system in our office. Initially, we had phones that would record, but it was only after someone pushed the record button on the phone and I would never get anything prior to the record button being pushed. In addition, the telephone system’s call recording speaker was very sensitive and if one of my employees sighed, breathed, or there was any other noise on our side of the phone, it would override the speaker and I would only hear our side of the conversation. It was very frustrating!

I have been recording our inbound and outbound telephone calls for over three years now and it is one of the best things I have ever done in my 25 years of practice management! The system I have was developed by OAISYS. They have two products, Tracer and Talkument. Talkument is more basic. I started with Talkument and upraded to Tracer about a year ago!

I did a case study for them because I love their product so much!

http://www.oaisys.com/casestudies/NSFM.aspx

and

http://www.oaisys.com/movies/flash_only/NSFM_Case_Study_flash.html

There is really no Federal Law regarding telephone recordings in this scenario. Each state has their own regulation and can either be “one-party” or “two-party”. One-party states only require one party to know about the telephone call being recorded and that would be the recording party. Two-party states require both parties and that is where you would hear the message that states “all calls are being recorded for quality assurance purposes.”

Arizona is a one-party state. I have my staff and physicians sign a disclaimer that they know that the phones are recorded, just to be on the safe side in my office. I also have a label on all phones reminding people that their conversation is recorded. I am the only person who can access the recordings…the physicians can not even access them!

Here is a website that covers telephone recording laws:

http://www.rcfp.org/taping/.

The OAISYS server is attached to our phone system. It has it’s own IP address, so there is no software to install on your phone system or computer server. I don’t remember how much hard drive space is on the server, but we have not filled the hard drive up yet. I do have another external hard drive attached to the system so when we do fill the drive, it is programmed to have the oldest calls dump into the external hard drive. All phone calls are saved and will be saved permanently, or until we decide to purge. I spoke with our malpractice insurer and they suggested that we retain the calls using the same guidelines as retaining patient medical records.

I am able to log into the server and the calls appear similar to how Outlook is laid out. I can search using various parameters, such as date of call, outside telephone number, office extension, inbound/outbound calls, etc. I can combine those parameters and do a search to drill down even further.

We have had three licensing board complaints and, in all three, I used the voice recordings as evidence…we won all three! All three licensing board complaints were completely dropped! Think about the malpractice savings because these things could have resulted in a malpractice lawsuit as well. This alone has covered the cost of the system over ten-fold!

In addition, I have used the voice recordings to help my staff in understanding that they made a mistake or may have sounded rude on the phone. Oftentimes, I can just let them listen and they discover the problem themselves…makes my job so much easier when they have the buy-in!

I have used it to fight insurance companies. I have used it for the smallest, mundane things, like the front office hanging up without getting a name or phone number of the patient…I go onto Talkument/Tracer and can pull the actual voice recording and re-listen to the person identifying themselves and the phone number shows up on caller ID on the system.

And, how many times, have you had a disgruntled patient who has stated that someone told them something and you know darn well that the person is not sharing the full truth with you? Yes, I have brought patient’s in my office to listen to their own conversation. I have emailed their telephone call to them proving that they made their appointment on a specific date, time and with a specific doctor because they state otherwise.

Bottomline is that I detest being lied to and I hate not knowing who to believe. If it happened on our phone line, I can hear it for myself and make my decisions based on fact! There is no better place to be and that, to me, is priceless.

My physicians and several other key staff, initially, had some trepidation about the system and now they bless the day we got it.  In fact, they wrote recommendation letters themselves sharing their feelings on having this system in our practice:

http://www.oaisys.com/downloads/NSFM_Letters_of_Recommendation.pdf

I seldom put this much passion into another company…OAISYS has won me over from the minute I saw them as a vendor at another conference I attended. I have had many dealings with OAISYS and they are a top notch company…if I ever think of ending this healthcare gig, I would be on their doorstep asking them to hire me! They use a third-party to do the installation, for us it was Sonoran Integrations, and they were excellent as well.

Oh, and another thing that we use it for, that may be of specific interest to those of you in Pediatrics:  Arizona has really strict laws regarding caring for minors and parental consent. As we all know, there are those parents that will drop their toddler off at one end of the block and expect him to get to the office, sign in and make informed medical decisions and pay their copay in Cheerios. Okay, maybe I am embellishing a little bit, but we all know that parents will drop off their teenagers and we cannot see them because we do not have parental consent.  With Talkument, I have the ability to record the parent’s consent and note in the chart that it was given and recorded (a verbal is okay, but I hate to have that “he said/she said” thing in a court of law!).

4 Responses »

 

The Importance of Endorsements Thursday, Sep 30 2010

As a rule, I don’t like to endorse companies or people; however, there are a few I would like to mention because I have had personal experience with them and find that they have exceeded my expectations on many levels.

OAISYS

OAISYS provides call recording for telephone systems; both inbound and outbound calls.  This has helped me as a Practice Administrator in so many ways and it is difficult to list all of them in a short summary.  I plan to provide a complete summary in an upcoming blog post.  Bottom line, though, there is not one single resource that has helped me as much as their Tracer system for call recording.  I have enjoyed benefits in the areas of Risk Management, Human Resources, Patient Relations, Insurance and Accounts Receivable/Revenue Cycle management.

Greenbranch Publishing

I believe this is the leader for publishing in the healthcare industry!  Their publication,The Journal of Medical Practice Management, is, by far, the most professional and informative resource available in the medical industry.  Greenbranch, also, publishes a wide variety of books, audiobooks, podcasts, and newsletters.  They offer AAPC CEU’s for many of the audioconferences, as well. Greenbranch has co-developed Codapedia, with Betsy Nicoletti, which is a “free encyclopedia of medical reimbursement”.

Don Self

Very generous in offering his time and resources, Don offers a database of free documents donated by others.  This alone is a valuable resource to anyone in the health care industry!  Recently, Don authored a book entitled, “The Unfiltered Guide to Medical Office Management“; this is a comprehensive guide for many issues relevant to a physician’s practice.  Don is in the business of consulting with the medical community to increase revenue; however, he also educates by speaking at conferences, publishing a newsletter and offering webinars.  Also, check out his E&M Sliderule…sure to be a hit for physicians and coders!

5 Responses »

 

Gardasil (HPV Vaccine) approved for boys/young men Sunday, Aug 22 2010

In the past several years, the FDA has approved new immunizations in an effort to prevent various illnesses, including sexually transmitted diseases that could result in cancer.  Once such vaccine, Gardasil, is “currently is approved for use in girls and women ages 9 through 26 for the prevention of cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancer caused by HPV types 16 and 18; precancerous lesions caused by types 6, 11, 16, and 18; and genital warts caused by types 6 and 11.”  In October 2009, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it approved the use of Gardasil vaccine for boys/men between the ages of 9 and 26 years of age, as well.

According to About.com, in providing Gardasil vaccines to young men, “the result would likely be:

• less spreading of HPV
• hopefully, fewer cases of cervical cancer in women
• perhaps, a decrease in other types of cancer”

HPV can cause genital warts in men that may lead to several types of cancer, including oral, penile and anal cancers.

As with most new immunizations, it can take up to a year for this to process through to the insurance companies before they create policies to cover the vaccines.  At this point, Gardasil is covered by most health plans for girls and young women; however, the same is not true for boys and young men.  The Gardasil vaccine is quite expensive and requires a serious of three vaccines over a six month period that could cost in the range of $650-800 for the entire series.  It is recommended that you verify with your health plan, beforehand, whether or not they cover this vaccine, especially for the male gender.  If they do not cover this vaccine, it will result in the cost being transferred to patient responsibility.

FDA announcement:  http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm187003.htm

About.com:  http://cancer.about.com/od/hpvvaccine/a/hpv_vaccine_boys.htm

4 Responses »